


underwater

by fourshoesfrank



Series: estatement fics ;)) [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Hawaii, Mermaids, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Statement Fic, Surfing, i wrote this for an irl friend and im posting it here, tw child death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:20:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23761456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank
Summary: Statement of Kanani Akina, regarding several encounters with a... mermaid, while employed as a surfing instructor.
Relationships: None?
Series: estatement fics ;)) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1711783
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	underwater

**Author's Note:**

> like i said in the tags, this was written for an irl friend of mine. also yes the statement giver’s name is the 2011 american girl doll of the year, what’re you gonna do about it

Statement of Kanani Akina, regarding four encounters with a... mermaid, while employed as a surfing instructor. Original statement given 1st of October, 2017. Statement begins. 

I don’t believe in European-style mermaids. There are no mythical women swimming around the ocean with fish tails and long blonde hair and singing voices that can make a sailor throw themself overboard. Those mermaids are a made-up story from before the Enlightenment happened, that’s it. 

That being said, this statement, or confession, or whatever you want me to call it, is about a mermaid. But don’t get me wrong—they don’t exist. At least, not the way we all seem to think they do. 

In Hawaiian mythology, there are magical creatures called mo’o. Their exact definition varies from story to story and island to island, but the common denominator is that the mo’o are mischievous women who can shapeshift into dragons, or into fish. Sometimes, they’re lizards who turn themselves into women. They can be good, or bad, or neutral, and their alliances shift as quickly and unpredictably as the sand in the wind. 

I’m from Hawai’i, as you can tell, just by my first name. My family lives on Kaua’i, the Garden Island. It’s the second-to-last in the chain, and I think it’s the furthest north. It’s a nice place. Not a lot of mainlanders end up there, and the ones that do usually stick to the tourist attractions and hotels. They don’t come up into the real parts of the island.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching people discover the wonders of my home. That’s the aloha spirit, after all! But at the same time, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun resenting the haoles. That’s kind of hypocritical, seeing how I work as a surfing instructor and I have to teach hundreds of them every summer, but I don’t like them as much as I did when I was a kid. They’re just... boring. They’re not mean; I don’t think anyone can find it in themselves to be cruel on vacation in Hawai’i. I just don’t like them. I teach them how to not capsize their board, they manage to ride a wave or two, and then they leave. 

But they don’t really leave, did they? I see the same haoles at the beach the next day, pretending to surf on those cardboard floating devices and splashing wave at their kids to make pretend waves. I teach the sixteen and above class, so I don’t get to see their kids. 

I don’t know, it’s just... jarring, I guess is the word I’ll use. It’s hard to believe these Georgians and Ohioans and Minnesotians and whatnot are from the same country as I am. 

Yikes. That got deep, huh? 

I eventually got really tired of teaching people how to surf on Kaua’i. I decided what the hell, I’ll move to the Big Island and see how it is over there. It was kind of the same, but also totally different. The job was the same, yes, but the water itself was different. Not bad different, yeah, but it was a change. I enjoyed it. The pay wasn’t that good, though, since everything’s more competitive over there. 

I left that job too, for the same reason. I was tired of feeling... not out of place, per se, but... too firmly in place. I could feel myself resisting everything around me and I knew it was going to end badly if I didn’t leave. Also, I was sick of trying to balance online art school with paying rent and having me time. 

So, I dropped out and went to American Samoa next. I chose it because it’s part of Polynesia, it’s under American jurisdiction (even though it shouldn’t be), and I’d already applied for a job there via the Internet and I was confident that I’d be accepted. 

I was mistaken. The position that I’d applied to had been filled for exactly a day, just one day, when I arrived. I took a cheap flight, both to save money and because in the Pacific, the cheap flights run closer to the water, and I wanted to watch the ocean. 

When I found out I didn’t get the job, I just sat on the beach and cried for about an hour. It was late, and it was the beginning of July, so the waterfront establishments were jammed full of tourists and a few families celebrating the Fourth of July. That holiday isn’t as big of a deal in American territories as it is on the mainland, so it wasn’t surprising to me that the waterfront was basically full of white people. I couldn’t call them haoles anymore, because that’s a Hawaiian-specific word, but they had the same vibes, you know? I guess I could’ve called them palagi, but I didn’t know it at the time. 

So anyway, I was sitting there, kinda crying, kinda just watching the ocean, when he came up to me. He was this really tall Samoan guy with a ton of tattoos, both traditional and modern, and he had a long surfboard tucked under his arm. He sat down next to me, stuck the board in the sand, and asked what was going on with me.

I don’t know why I answered. Maybe because I was desperate for any real conversation with another Polynesian? Maybe because he was kinda hot? Maybe because I was just straight up emotionally comprised at that moment and I couldn’t properly process what a bad idea it was to talk to a strange man at night? Who knows?

But I did answer him. I told him about the application fiasco and how I felt stifled by the haoles and how I didn’t know what on Earth I was gonna do next. He just kinda bumped me with his shoulder and clapped a hand on my back and told me it was gonna be okay, that my situation would improve. Y’know, typical stuff. Stuff I’d already told myself, to no effect. 

He sighed then, like he could tell what I was thinking. He asked what I was planning to do next. I didn’t know. He offered me a job. 

I accepted. He gave me a business card, printed in Samoan and English, with his details and his name. His name was Isaia Fiso. Looking back, I’m almost completely sure the cards were fake, because they didn’t look... right. They looked wrong. The words looked alright at first but then the longer I read them, trying to memorize the address and see if my knowledge of Hawaiian would help me understand Samoan, the words started to swim in front of my eyes. I told myself I was just tired, at the time. 

The next day I started working for Isaia. Turns out, he owned a good sized stretch of beach on the island’s east side. He was always going on about how that was good for business, because the tourists could have their romantic sunset ride without the sun in their eyes. I don’t know why he was so dead set on that point. We didn’t even get that many honeymooners or anything. 

I liked American Samoa. It was nice, living there, working there, all that. My coworkers were nice, I made friends, y’know, everything went smoothly after that hiccup when I first arrived. 

It went too smoothly. I don’t mean that I was cruising along on a wave of illegal cash or anything, but everything seemed oddly calm. The job shouldn’t have been that easy for me. I mean, I had just moved twenty-five hundred miles south, to a place where I had literally zero friends, and somehow I was doing just fine?

My job working for Isaia was the same thing I’d been doing all along: teaching people from ages sixteen to twenty-five how to surf. I liked my job, and I was good at it. So, when one of my coworkers—Taimane was her name, I don’t remember her surname—asked me to take over a lifeguard shift while she took her cat to the vet, I was in a good enough mood that I agreed. I wasn’t technically qualified to be a lifeguard, but, I figured, if I could prevent people from drowning themselves on the open water, I could prevent people from drowning themselves in the swim area. 

Taimane’s shift was right after mine ended. I put the boards away, borrowed a clean whistle and visor cap from Taimane’s locker, and sat in the lifeguard’s chair. It was about a quarter past seven, I think. My shift had ended at a quarter til seven, so I’m pretty sure the timeline looks pretty much like that. 

It was uneventful. I almost fell asleep once, because there was a cushion on the chair and the sun was really warm. I found my eyes drifting out past the swim area to watch the other surf instructors a lot. It was while I was watching them mount their boards and take their students for a ride that I saw the mermaid. I didn’t think she was a mermaid at first, though, I just thought she was somebody who had swam way too far out. I blew my whistle and shouted for the woman with the long black hair to please return to the designated swim area. 

As soon as I put the megaphone down, the woman dived beneath the surface of the water and I couldn’t see her anymore. I thought I saw a dark shape moving towards the beach from her last position, but I must’ve been kidding myself, because when I saw her resurface she was even farther out. At this point, I was beginning to get angry. This wasn’t even my job, for crying out loud. I was supposed to be home, reading a book or FaceTiming my brothers or something, not preventing some stupid woman from getting killed by the riptide. 

But anyway, I still climbed down from my seat and informed the other lifeguard on duty that I was going out past the swim area to retrieve a woman who wasn’t listening to my warnings. I don’t remember the other lifeguard’s name at all. He acknowledged me, and said he’d keep an eye on my section while I was out there. I grabbed a surfboard before I went, since I figured the lady would probably be tired out by the time I got to her. Also, the floatation device was missing. 

I paddled out past the swim area, past the surfing class, to where I thought I’d last seen the woman. There was absolutely no sign of her when I got there, and I kind of panicked a little, not gonna lie. I went underwater and started looking for her, swimming in slowly growing circles around the area where she’d been. I came up for air after about two minutes, got back on the board, and I saw her. She was just floating there, calmly treading water, and she was smiling at me. That was the detail I thought was the most out of place. She should’ve been angry at me, or relieved, or something. Instead, her smile looked almost predatory. 

I returned her smile, though I felt uneasy doing so, and asked what she was doing so far out. 

She said, “I wanted a better view.” I pressed, asking what she wanted a view of, but she wouldn’t say. She just said that she was happy to have some company while she watched. She wouldn’t say what she was watching. 

I told her to get on the surfboard and return to shore with me, but she refused, and something in me knew that if she didn’t want to go back, she wasn’t gonna go back. I didn’t really know what to do then, so I just sat on the board next to her for a while. I zoned out for a little while, I guess, because I don’t remember anything that happened between our conversation and the screaming. 

Somebody in the surfing group was screaming their head off. I didn’t understand what they were saying; 

they were a local, and I my Samoan wasn’t good enough to make out any words. It snapped me out of whatever trance I’d been in, though, which was good. I looked around and saw the long-haired woman disappearing beneath the water’s surface again. I put her out of my mind and swam over to the group, leaving the board where it was. It was a cheap beginner’s board made for stability, not speed, and I thought that I’d need to get there quick in order to address whatever was going on. 

The person who was screaming was a local, a teenager named Joey Seuava. The instructor leading the group, Elisapeta Fiso, told me that Joey’s brother had just fallen off of his board. I asked why they all seemed so concerned about that, since Losi was a strong swimmer. She said that they couldn’t find him anywhere. 

I dove down and searched for Losi Seuava for as long as I could hold my breath, but eventually I had to admit defeat. I hadn’t seen anything except fish, sand, and a broken boat propeller. Joey was heartbroken, of course, and Elisapeta was equally distraught. She kept saying it was her fault, that she hadn’t realized how strong the riptide must’ve been. At the time, I accepted that theory. I told her that the currents were unpredictable, the ocean was a dangerous place, Losi knew the risk, all those comforting things you tell somebody who’s beating themself up over something they couldn’t have prevented. But now, looking back, I don’t think the riptide got him. 

I guided everybody back to shore so we could tell the authorities what happened, and then I went home. The shift I was covering was over, and Losi has technically been Elisapeta’s responsibility, so I saw no reason to stay. 

But as the weeks wore on and we didn’t hear anything about Losi being found, or even searched for, I began to feel that same jarring sensation whenever I talked to the haoles. Palagi. Whatever. The point is, Elisapeta lost her job, and I quit about a week later. I tried to find another job, but there were no surfing classes that weren’t frequented by haoles. I moved after another week of searching. 

I thought, maybe the problem was with how the mainlanders acted in the Pacific. Maybe they behaved differently in the Caribbean, the other place that mainland Americans go to surf. So I moved to the US Virgin Islands and got a job there, on St. Thomas, which is supposedly the least expensive island to live on. It was still outrageously expensive compared to Kaua’i, Hawai’i, and Tutuila, but compared to the other Virgin Islands, it was... palatable. 

Surfing in the Caribbean is so different from the Pacific. The water is just... different. It took a long time to get used to, and I almost got fired for teaching people some Pacific-specific techniques that didn’t seem to work in the Caribbean. Still, I adjusted. 

It happened again right after I’d begun to really settle in. A lifeguard got me to cover their shift, I saw a lady with long black hair out in the water where she shouldn’t’ve been, I went out to retrieve her, and a kid went missing. I can’t remember his name. Is that bad?

This time, I quit immediately. I told my boss some bullshit about a family emergency, got on a ferry to St. Croix, and took a flight from there to the Florida Keys. Gave myself a mini vacation while I thought about what to do next. I hadn’t liked St. Thomas as much as I thought I would, so I made arrangements to move out of my apartment and got a cheap hotel room on the sketchy side of Key West. There’s not that much surfing there, so I found a job as a lifeguard on one of the smaller beaches. I was almost immediately annoyed at the vacationers who I had to watch all day, but my salary was ridiculously high, so I just accepted the fact that mainlanders were irritating and focused on doing my job. 

It only took her five days to show up this time. On September sixteenth, around eight in the morning, I saw a woman with long black hair swimming out in the distance, way beyond the designated swim area. The only other people swimming were a younger Black couple with their small child, and they agreed to stay on the beach until I dealt with the other woman. I think I told them she was a professional swimmer with a poor sense of direction, or something like that. I didn’t want them to worry. 

I swam out to meet the woman for the third time. She was way farther out than she’d been the other two times, and I was just starting to slow down when she popped up in front of me. I greeted her and she smiled at me, just like always. I asked her why she was there. She said she wanted a better view. I didn’t bother to ask what she wanted to look at this time. 

I thought she wouldn’t be able to harm anybody this time. I was sure by then that she was the cause of both Losi’s disappearance and that of the missing St. Thomas kid. I was not going to let her take another child.

I don’t know how she managed to get past me. All I know is that one moment, I was treading water and staring into her strange, predatory eyes, and the next moment I was hearing the dreaded wail of despair coming from the beach. I had failed. 

I immediately struck out for the beach, of course. I was afraid for the child, and for my job. I was the only lifeguard on duty that early in the morning. If a kid disappeared, it would be blamed on me, and I don’t think evil mermaids would be a passable excuse. 

When I was about halfway to the beach, I noticed a dark shape swimming below me, leaving a darker trail behind it. I ducked down underwater to see it better, and... 

I’m sorry, I’m getting tears on your paper. Sorry. It’s painful to think about this. 

The long-haired woman looked like a demon. Her jaw was extended beyond the rest of her face, and in that jaw, held between razor-sharp teeth, was the leg of the child from the beach. The rest of the body was—I’m so sorry about these tear stains—clutched in the woman’s arms, which were drawn tight against her thickly muscled body while her shark-like tail propelled her forward. The dark trail behind her was the child’s blood.

As she passed below me, she looked me in the eyes, and she smiled. Doing so caused the leg to fall out of her mouth and float up beside me. I screamed, although the couple on the beach didn’t hear me because I was still underwater. I screamed, choked on water, and thrust myself up into the air before I drowned. I lost sight of her while this happened, and I couldn’t find her again no matter how hard I looked. 

I brought the leg back to the shore, but I didn’t go directly back to the beach. I took a detour around to the nearest marina and ran to the harbor patrol’s office clutching the small severed limb to my body in the same way the mermaid had held the rest of it. 

There was an official investigation into both increased shark activity and the possibility of an abduction, but neither was able to turn up anything conclusive. I lost my job, because of course I did, but I was never a suspect. Thank goodness for that. 

And that’s really all there is. I’ve moved to Sitka, Alaska. It’ll never beat the tropics, but there’s nowhere to swim except pools. And it turns out that being a horror artist is almost as fulfilling as being a surfing instructor. Who knew I’d end up here?

Statement ends. 

**Author's Note:**

> hope u fellas liked it,,,,please leave kudos and/or comment!


End file.
